6th June 2012 Archive

As Amazon Web Services figured out nearly three years ago, companies don't want to buy virtual servers, they want to buy multi-tiered virtual private clouds consisting of a mix of servers, storage, networking, and other services that act like a real data center.

An API for accessing historical weather data from ACORNSat, and another designed to help citizens monitor bushfires in their area, are among the prize-winners from last weekend’s GovHack event in Canberra and Sydney.

The world just got stranger: not only is Microsoft trying to write cool software again, it’s decided that Android is the ideal beta platform, in spite of its bitter worldwide spat with Google over patents.

Forget Ivy Bridge and Ultrabooks, Intel already has its partners working on 20 new tablet designs based on its Clover Trail Atom chips, as the firm looks to take on rival ARM in its own back yard with a renewed mobile push.

The Chinese government wants the United States to can a popular Twitter feed set up by its Beijing embassy to monitor air pollution in the crowded capital, after launching an indirect attack claiming such readings were illegal.

Asian IT directors advise getting legal brains to read the fine print before vaporising IT

IT leaders have stressed the need for firms to carry out rigorous due diligence on cloud providers, warning that dishonest sales tactics, hidden extra costs, latency and governance issues could ruin key projects.

An NHS Trust is disputing a record fine the Information Commissioner's Office has levelled on it for leaving tons of data on patients and staff on hard drives that were sold on eBay instead of being destroyed.

As I type this, Facebook stock is trending toward a $26.84 per share price, valuing the company at $57bn, or roughly half the value Facebook held on its first day of trading two weeks ago. While the market plays a round of "You're to Blame!", Facebook is suffering from inflated expectations. Facebook's net profit margin and operating margin have both dropped since 2011, as expenses have mounted but revenues in its fast-growing mobile market have failed to keep pace. Its clear that Facebook isn't made of magical pixie dust.

Dutch artist Bart Jansen has taken the aviation world by storm by rolling out the world's first dead cat quadcopter – a remote-controlled flying feline dubbed the "Orvillecopter" in honour of Orville Wright.

Back in the early- to mid-1990s, the Mac wasn't considered much cop as a games platform. Sure, it had a sexier GUI than Windows boxes, but they could drop out into DOS and dedicate their CPUs' few tens of megahertz to games. Not so the Mac.

As true patriots last weekend rolled out the bunting and unfurled a celebratory pint in honour of her Maj Queen Liz II's 60 years atop the throne of Merry Old Blighty™, we here at El Reg's Special Projects Bureau took a few moments from shouting "Gawd bless yer ma'am" to ponder matters of perhaps greater import, viz: just how to make sure rocket motors go pop at altitude.

It's a chilly night in December 1978, and inside Zhivago's nightclub in Southend, a bunch of pubescent disco divas are getting down to the sounds of Earth, Wind and Fire, amid the clink of Tizer bottles and the rustle of terylene slacks.

Vodafone has splurged on a controlling interest in Groupon-tribute-act Vouchercloud, the spawn of the Pet Shop Boys' keyboardist Scott Davidson. Voda is now mulling over spunking a load more cash on Telstra's New Zealand operation.

Revolution Analytics, aka "Red Hat for stats" – which commercialized the open source R programming language and statistical analysis tool – has now tweaked its R Enterprise stack and pushed out a 6.0 release.

Many website operators have responded to the Information Commissioner's last-minute watered-down tweak to implementing the European Union's cookie law by doing absolutely nothing to show that they have complied with the legislation.

Have you ever resuscitated a Ruby developer? Heimlich manoeuvred a Hadoop hacker? Applied a tourniquet to a tester in QA? If you, or someone you know in the IT industry, has performed a feat of first aid at work, St John Ambulance would like to hear from you.

The Logical Domain hypervisor for Sparc T series processors, known formally as Oracle VM Server for Sparc, is probably one of the best technologies created by the former Sun Microsystems for its homegrown servers.

Again adhering to the Cupertinian creed that "the best defense is a good offense," Apple has filed its third complaint against Taiwanese smartphone-maker HTC at the US International Trade Commission (ITC), citing patent infringement and requesting a bar on a welter of HTC devices from being imported into the US.

Blade server and virtualization upstart Egenera has been gradually transforming itself from a hardware vendor to a management tool maker, and with its latest round of software is leaping from virtualized blade servers to the clouds while at the same time extending the capacity of blade infrastructure it can manage.

Google has been singing the praises of its mapping projects, outlining plans for a fleet of aircraft to provide 3D city modeling, offline storage of detailed maps, using StreetView on skis and snowmobiles and the mapping national museums and monuments with backpack 360 degree cameras.

Microsoft got so excited about its upcoming enhancements to the Windows Azure cloud, due to be divulged in detail tomorrow, that it jumped the gun on its own announcement, perhaps to try to steal a little thunder from cloudy announcements from Oracle and Red Hat.

A desperate need for consolidation in the New Zealand market is being driven by the government’s national broadband network initiatives and could see accelerated exits and/or acquisitions according to analysts Ovum.